Giving people advice they don’t want to hear can be hard,
or worse, awkward. But now, the Internet is making it easy.
Thanks to “How Do I Say This?”, the brainchild of
David Harris, a fourth-year graduate student in the UCLA School of
Theater, Film and Television, anxious participants can worry no
more about those viciously awkward moments.
“We’re making videos for people who don’t know
how to say something to somebody important in their lives,”
Harris said. “In the previous films that I’ve done,
they’ve always been about people who have something important
to communicate and they don’t know how.”
RELATED LINK Click here
to watch the first "How Do I Say This?" film clip.
“How Do I Say This?” is a digital broadband forum
for users to offer troubles, suggestions and advice which are then
transformed into short film clips online.
The Web site www.howdoisaythis.com, developed and maintained by
Harris and his team, goes live today on its own page and mtvU.
Harris, a directing student, was inspired to develop the project
by the mtvU and Cisco Systems-sponsored competition Digital
Incubator, which called for ideas and submissions in new digital
media.
The competition, now accepting a second group of applications,
awarded 10 student groups from around the country up to $25,000 of
funding for further development of their projects and an integral
spot on the mtvU broadband lineup across college campuses for the
next six months.
Other projects include New York University’s
“Snagu,” an ongoing camera phone-based scavenger hunt,
and Brown University’s “Tower 8,” a comic book
rock opera set in a post-apocalyptic world.
According to Ross Martin, head of programming for mtvU,
competitions such as Digital Incubator allow college students to
creatively utilize broadband Internet, such as the network
available at UCLA.
“(The project is) a way of incubating and empowering
pioneering broadband students who are doing incredibly new,
experimental and exciting work,” Martin said.
“We were looking for special projects, students who were
really passionate about bringing their project to life in the
digital space. It’s the Wild West ““ completely
uncharted territory ““ and students like David Harris are
leading the way.”
Harris and his team have been busily working to prepare for
today’s launch date.
But the project is also contingent on the online community that
will feed “How Do I Say This?” what it has trouble
saying in real life.
“This is for everybody, for college students, for your
parents, your uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews ““ and the idea
is that everybody can be part of this art that we’re making
together,” said co-creator Dagmar Weaver-Madsen, a graduate
student in cinematography.
Each short film will be live-action, acted out by puppets
(Harris is also a puppeteer) or hired actors, and almost everything
in the clips ““ including the dialogue, props and characters
““ will be pulled from the ideas of the online community.
Site creator Aaron Koblin, a UCLA alumnus, spearheads the
maintenance and programming of the Web site and is responsible for
all of the online interaction.
Harris and Weaver-Madsen hope to update the site with a new clip
every weekday, but the end of each month will result in a longer
film that is a culmination of clips around a central theme.
Daily clips are not necessarily explicitly related, but the end
result will offer newfound, thought-provoking advice from a myriad
of sources.
“Everyone can see this communal video that they made, and
they can feel like they were all a part of this film,”
Weaver-Madsen said.
Once the Web site goes live, users everywhere can submit their
own advice and problems and watch their suggestions come to
life.
“Maybe it’ll be a way of connecting people,”
Weaver-Madsen said. “We get to make some content for mtvU
that might be funny and entertaining, but it ultimately might
actually help people’s lives, and change them.”
One of the first clips of the program will feature collected
advice for the struggling actor who should probably just get off
the stage.
“The fundamental questioning of the definition of
community is really provocative,” Martin said.
“The idea that no one has the answer, but everyone has the
answer. You could leverage an online community to solve equations.
It’s really powerful.”